Tuesday, November 20, 2007

"We would like invite you to participate in a study of health bloggers, "From My Experience to Yours: Taking the Pulse of Health Care Blogs in the Blogosphere," administered by Brown University. The study assesses the use of blogging in the area of health and medicine."

They're targeting "health-related" bloggers; of course, if they truly understood the genre, they'd call us "medbloggers." Still, it's interesting that they're trying to quantify our little corner of the blogosphere.

The survey's hosted by a site called, of course, "SurveyMonkey." It was pretty well done (took me about 5 or 6 minutes to do). They asked questions about how long I'd been blogging, and (more importantly) why. What they didn't ask was also interesting: no questions about blogging for money, or awards, for example. There were some demographic questions (age, household income, etc). They specifically asked if I was Hispanic (I'm not, but my daughter's in Honors Spanish).

At the very beginning, they said this:

"This survey is part of a research study at Brown University of health-related blogs, covering such topics as health policy, research and news, specific illnesses or diseases, and personal experiences of doctors, students, and patients. Our research examines the ways in which blogging has impacted discussion of health topics, information dissemination, and community-building."

The email promised me "a summary of the responses." One supposes that this is remuneration enough.

"We would like invite you to participate in a study of health bloggers, "From My Experience to Yours: Taking the Pulse of Health Care Blogs in the Blogosphere," administered by Brown University. The study assesses the use of blogging in the area of health and medicine."

They're targeting "health-related" bloggers; of course, if they truly understood the genre, they'd call us "medbloggers." Still, it's interesting that they're trying to quantify our little corner of the blogosphere.

The survey's hosted by a site called, of course, "SurveyMonkey." It was pretty well done (took me about 5 or 6 minutes to do). They asked questions about how long I'd been blogging, and (more importantly) why. What they didn't ask was also interesting: no questions about blogging for money, or awards, for example. There were some demographic questions (age, household income, etc). They specifically asked if I was Hispanic (I'm not, but my daughter's in Honors Spanish).

At the very beginning, they said this:

"This survey is part of a research study at Brown University of health-related blogs, covering such topics as health policy, research and news, specific illnesses or diseases, and personal experiences of doctors, students, and patients. Our research examines the ways in which blogging has impacted discussion of health topics, information dissemination, and community-building."

The email promised me "a summary of the responses." One supposes that this is remuneration enough.